Recent succession of soil microorganisms and vegetation has occurred in the glacier foreland, because of
glacier thawing. In this study, whole microbial communities, including bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes,
from the glacier foreland of Midtre Lov？nbreen in Svalbard were analyzed by metagenome sequencing,
using the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) platform. Soil samples were collected from two
research sites (ML4 and ML7), with different exposure times, from the ice. A total of 2,798,108 and 1,691,859
reads were utilized for microbial community analysis based on the metagenomic sequences of ML4 and
ML7, respectively. The relative abundance of microbial communities at the domain level showed a high
proportion of bacteria (about 86？87%), whereas archaeal and eukaryotic communities were poorly represented
by less than 1%. The remaining 12% of the sequences were found to be unclassified. Predominant
bacterial groups included Proteobacteria (40.3% from ML4 and 43.3% from ML7) and Actinobacteria (22.9%
and 24.9%). Major groups of Archaea included Euryarchaeota (84.4% and 81.1%), followed by Crenarchaeota
(10.6% and 13.1%). In the case of eukaryotes, both ML4 and ML7 samples showed Ascomycota (33.8% and
45.0%) as the major group. These findings suggest that metagenome analysis using the Ion Torrent PGM
platform could be suitably applied to analyze whole microbial community structures, providing a basis for
assessing the relative importance of predominant groups of bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic microbial
communities in the Arctic glacier foreland of Midtre Lov？nbreen, with high resolution.